Canadian elections

[maxque]

May 29, 2018 22:44:51 GMT Foggy said:

May 29, 2018 22:04:12 GMT Sibboleth said:

They've run a low-key bad government since they took power. But that was fine for the electorate because they'd had enough of High Energy trainwreck governments. The main thing that's turned the situation toxic is energy policy: an incompetently executed privatisation and dreadfully planned green levies etc. have sent energy bills through the roof and there's a perception that the OLP don't care.

Ah yes, the 'cap and trade' scheme they signed up to alongside Québec and California slipped my mind. That's been getting a lot of bad press too, though strangely the right have attacked some of the federal government's approach to environmental issues during the campaign in a rare conflagration with provincial policy areas. As you say, all these controversies fall under the heading of 'energy' at any rate, which if Ontario voters were sensible should mean we'd be on course for a Green landslide... 

Attacking cap and trade is stupid, as the federal will soon mandate provinces to "cap and trade" or to adopt "carbon pricing". The former is cheaper than the later.

[Sibboleth]

A Guide to the Parties of Ontario

Ontario Liberal Party - currently led by Kathleen Wynne, the Liberals are a rather dull managerialist centre party and have been the dominant force in provincial politics over the past decade as Ontario's voters finally tired of drama and decided that, frankly, they preferred things to be bland, insipid and uninspired thank you very much. They were re-elected on much the same platform in 2007, 2011 and 2014 despite objectively sucking at actually running things more complex than a lemonade stand. Which tells you something. The Liberals are effectively a party of urban Ontario, particularly Toronto and its surrounding suburbs. Most of its remaining rural bastions in the South West and East of the province were lost - quite probably forever - in 2011. In the cities where it thrives it is mostly strong in upscale districts and amongst minorities. Until very recently the Liberals gave off the distinctive whiff of a party of power, but this appears to have been a typical Canadian illusion and the party now faces a desperate fight not to remain in power but to retain as much of the furniture as possible. History gives added reason for fear: ousted from power in 1943 the Liberals spent the next four decades in perpetual opposition and spent much of this period as a repository for rural voters unhappy with the Big Blue Machine. This changed in 1985 as the PCs disintegrated in a mess of unpleasant factional infighting: a deal with the NDP allowed for the formation of a minority Liberal government under the charismatic/arrogant leadership of visionary leader/hubristic blowhard David Peterson. The Peterson government was re-elected in a landslide in 1987 but suffered an unexpected landslide loss to the NDP in 1990 after Peterson foolishly called a snap election despite corruption scandals, a dodgy economy and a Canada-wide constitutional crisis. The Liberals were unable to seriously exploit the failings of the Rae government, nor of the ultra-right wing Harris government that followed and remained in opposition - and always leading the opposition - until voters had enough of all that drama shit and fell in love with the creepy Norman Bates look-a-like Dalton McGuinty who promised them the mildly ineffectual tedium that they now craved. Following a succession of minor scandals and by-election defeats, McGuinty resigned and was replaced by Wynne who led the party to a surprisingly emphatic re-election in 2014. Nothing has gone right since. A needless and badly managed energy privatisation and ill-thought out environmental policies have caused utility bills to soar - the combination of this and the Wynne government's decision to go full #woke has led to populist rage from left and right and an electoral atmosphere of profound toxicity.

Ontario Progressive Conservative Party - currently led by Doug Ford (the crass and charmless brother of the crass yet charming Rob Ford, Toronto's late and legendary crack-smoking suburban-backlash Mayor), the PCs were once more or less what the Liberals have been since 2003 (i.e. a principle-free party of power based in the province's major cities), but have spent the past few decades as a party of remorseless hardline Thatcherites. The frankly unnerving ideological zealotry of the 1990s is gone, but the transformation seems permanent. Successive poor performances have left much traditional PC territory in and around Toronto in Liberal hands, leaving the PCs as a party of rural Ontario (including those parts that were traditionally Liberal) and of Toronto and Ottawa's outermost suburbs and dormitory settlements. Under the leadership of various extremely dull and extremely Upper Canadian figures (with names as clichéd as 'George Drew' and 'Leslie Frost'), the 'Big Blue Machine' ran the province - though not always with a majority - from 1943 until 1985, when pent-up factional issues exploded on the election of the overtly right-wing Frank Miller as party leader. Miller alienated many urban voters and was also damaged amongst rural Protestant voters by the decision of his moderate predecessor to extend funding for Catholic schools in the province. The PCs rightward shift solidified in opposition and culminated in the long leadership of humourless Thatcherite hatchet man Mike Harris (1990-2002). Harris led the PCs to an unexpected landslide - Ontario has a thing for these - over both the hapless Rae government and the overconfident Liberal opposition at the 1995 election. Significantly he did so on an openly hard-right platform: the so-called 'Common Sense Revolution'. Traditionally ineffectual opposition from the Liberals and the sad state of the demoralised and broken NDP meant that the PCs won a second term in 1999. The Common Sense Revolution was every bit as insane as its name suggested, and Harris's poorly planned Thatcherite 'revolution' ultimately led to the deaths of seven people in the small town of Walkerton as regulatory failure caused by a botched privatisation resulted in the pollution of the town's water supply with human excrement. One may wish to reflect on the symbolism of this. Harris suddenly resigned in 2002 and was succeeded by an old crony called Ernie Eves who led the PCs to a landslide defeat in 2003. Since then the PCs have flopped around in a rather purposeless manner (including a period when they were led by the gloriously incompetent John Tory) but have not fundamentally changed the message. Following the resignation of the graceless hack Tim Hudack after his second defeat, the PC's elected the smooth and slick Patrick Brown as their new leader and he seemed set for power... right up until he was #metooed. Farcical scenes followed - Brown even made an abortive and entirely surreal bid to retain the job he had resigned from, arguing, not very convincingly, that he had not really quit at all - and the victor of the clown car race that followed was Doug Ford, an otherwise entirely unremarkable man who had attained a high media profile and a questionable reputation as a 'populist' (in reality it always comes across as forced and astroturf in tone) because of the antics of his dead brother. Shortly after Ford's ascendancy one poll put PC support as high as 50%, but to say that Doug Ford lacks his brother's naive electoral genius would be quite the understatement...

Ontario New Democratic Party - currently led by Andrea Horwath, the NDP is Ontario's social democratic party of record and while it usually finishes third it has occasionally challenged for power (and on one occasion was luckless enough to actually win it). It is a party of Ontario's manufacturing towns and its remote industrial North. It also retains a degree of strength in Toronto, but is a shadow of its pre-Rae strength in the city: recovery there is essential in order for the party to have any realistic prospect of truly competing for power. Both its strength in working class areas outside Ontario's great cities and its relative weakness within them have been reinforced by the populist approach of the Horwath leadership, though Howarth has adopted a more 'traditional' tone for this election and, if the polls are to be believed, it is likely to bring dividends. The Ontario NDP is officially the Ontario wing of the national NDP and like the national party it was formed out of the more overtly left-wing CCF - which had come heartbreakingly close to power in 1943 - in the 1960s. Under a succession of urbane Toronto-based right-wingers it made steady progress in the 1960s and 1970s and for a time had a larger caucus than the Liberals. A swing to the left under a new leader in the early 1980s resulted in the inevitable electoral rebuff and another leader in the traditional ('right-wing', urbane, Toronto) mold: Bob Rae. Initially quite successful - under his leadership the NDP worked with the Peterson Liberals to topple the Big Blue Machine and then avoided serious electoral damage in the 1987 landslide - things started to go horribly wrong for Rae and for the NDP the moment the party was unexpectedly swept to power in 1990. The Rae government was an abysmal failure and put back the cause of social democracy in Ontario back several decades. Details can be found elsewhere; for now it is enough to observe that the Rae government managed to alienate both the NDP's working class base and the new voters it gained in 1990 and that the loathing it inspired at all points rightwards contributed directly to the appeal of the Common Sense Revolution. At the 1995 election the NDP were beaten into a poor third place. Leadership of the shattered party passed to the well-meaning but ineffectual Howard Hampton who led it to a further electoral collapse in 1999 as the logic of 'strategic voting' saw the NDP relegated to near irrelevance. Hampton remained leader until 2009 and presided over a slow rebuilding of the party, a process aided by fading memories of the Rae government (and quite probably by Bob Rae's contemporaneous decision to enter federal politics as a Liberal). Hampton was succeeded by Andrea Horwath, who in 2011 led the NDP to their first credible result since the defeat of the Rae government, despite running a campaign that clearly alienated many voters in Toronto. A repeat performance followed in 2014. The unpopularity of the Wynne government and the PCs travails have now placed Horwath and the NDP on the verge of a major electoral breakthrough.

[maxque]

PC plan is out and shockingly for a Conservative Party, it is not clearly costed.

Well, people did calculations and it has the largest deficit of all parties, by far. It's off by 11 billions. Not surprising when promising to increase services, cut taxes and not abolish any public servant job.

[Foggy]

Looks like Ontario will sink further into debt no matter which party wins, then.

Sib summarised the main 3 parties brilliantly above. The others that might be worth mentioning are the Greens, Trillium and the Libertarian Party.

The Ontario branch of the Green Party is nothing to write home about. Its level of popularity roughly follows that of its federal counterpart (they reached 8% in 2007 under Frank de Jong), who technically held a seat in Thunder Bay for a couple of years following a defection by the NDP's Bruce Hyer. They have a few areas of relative strength in the middle of the province, and are basically adopting the usual tactic of piling all their resources into one riding in order to get their leader elected (which worked federally in 2011 and in 3 other provinces from 2013-15) whilst complaining from the sidelines about not being invited. Polls show they're roughly where they were last time in terms of popular support, just below 5%. As with many Canadian Green parties, they generally take less overtly far-left positions on some issues than most of their equivalents in other countries. 

Trillium is the name of the provincial flower of Ontario, an outline of which appears on the logo of 3 of the 4 more largest parties. The party that decided to call itself that is only fielding 26 candidates, but merit a cursory glance if only because they had an incumbent at dissolution thanks to a defection from the Tories (his seat is disappearing but he's standing in one of the successor constituencies). It's not really clear what sets them apart from all the rest of the smaller right-wing parties, except possibly being more vocal about increased direct democracy. The moniker 'trillium' appears to be an allusion to the former Wildrose Party in Alberta, but that came with the advantage of the symbolism of the provincial flower characterising the perceived Albertan spirit: untamed and nice to look at but capable of inflicting damage to the untrained handler. White trillium [trillium grandiflorum], on the other hand, is just literally nothing more than a flower that happens to grow abundantly in parts of Ontario (and Québec and Nova Scotia and Vancouver Island and, er... Minnesota and Ohio and Georgia, among other places). 

The Libertarians have come remarkably close to running a full slate of candidates, with only 7 constituencies missing. Had there been a more moderate PC leader in place, they could well have eaten into a small but significant chunk of that party's support. One of the reasons for the scale of the NDP victory in 1990 was that the presence of two smaller right-wing parties split the vote. The bizarre nationalist/localist/populist/ultra-anglo mix of the Confederation of Regions managed 1.9% on that occasion, whilst the more standard socially conservative Family Coalition took 2.7%. It looks very unlikely that the Libertarian Party and Trillium can scale the heights of a combined 4.6% of the vote this time, which is one of the reasons Doug Ford's mob might have a decent level of efficiency in their vote spread.

[Hash]

The Trillium Party is a cranky far-right (and anti-Francophone) party, whose website's 'policy' section is a bizarre and disjointed mix of incoherent far-right ramblings you'd expect from a bad tabloid newspaper rather than a political party's website. Fittingly, the party's sole MPP, Jack MacLaren (who represents the exurban and rural parts of western Ottawa) is a former leader of the very right-wing Ontario Landowners Association and was booted from the PC caucus last year for anti-Francophone comments. That sort of anti-Francophone chauvinism is now very much out of the mainstream in provincial politics (but this certainly wasn't always the case, particularly in the glory days of PC Ontario), but isn't all that uncommon among angry right-wing Anglophones.

[Foggy]

Jun 1, 2018 2:30:03 GMT Hash said:

The Trillium Party is a cranky far-right (and anti-Francophone) party, whose website's 'policy' section is a bizarre and disjointed mix of incoherent far-right ramblings you'd expect from a bad tabloid newspaper rather than a political party's website. Fittingly, the party's sole MPP, Jack MacLaren (who represents the exurban and rural parts of western Ottawa) is a former leader of the very right-wing Ontario Landowners Association and was booted from the PC caucus last year for anti-Francophone comments. That sort of anti-Francophone chauvinism is now very much out of the mainstream in provincial politics (but this certainly wasn't always the case, particularly in the glory days of PC Ontario), but isn't all that uncommon among angry right-wing Anglophones.

Hmm, I wonder if the Anglophone chauvinists are aware of where the term 'chauvinism' originated?

[Deleted]

Calculated Politics have Seat Projections going all over the place - Northumberland for example is now forecast NDP out of nowhere. From what I can glean it appears the NDP bounce will be least evident in their old Northern Ontario heartlands. Whilst I'm certain it will remain NDP, at the beginning of the campaign Kiiwetinoong was seen as the Liberals' best shot at a gain. Kenora-Rainy River is looking quite tight too.

CBC are predicting a good night for the PCs - they're suggesting 72 for them. They also only predict one Liberal and no Greens. Meanwhile Forum Research seem to have recovered - they predict the PCs four points ahead of the NDP.

[The Bishop]

Jun 2, 2018 8:07:30 GMT @beesley said:

Meanwhile Forum Research seem to have recovered - they predict the PCs four points ahead of the NDP

A quite ridiculous swing from their previous poll, which points to the strong possibility that both are junk.

[Deleted]

Jun 2, 2018 9:41:08 GMT The Bishop said:

Jun 2, 2018 8:07:30 GMT @beesley said:

Meanwhile Forum Research seem to have recovered - they predict the PCs four points ahead of the NDP

A quite ridiculous swing from their previous poll, which points to the strong possibility that both are junk.

I don't think many people use Forum Research as an accurate pollster - but they have the advantage (or perhaps disadvantage to others) of being very prominent.

[Deleted]

Bad move.

[pragmaticidealist]

So even she has concluded that her party cannot Wynne?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Getting my coat.

[Foggy]

Yeah, because the 'defeatist incumbent' tactic worked out so very well for Labor when Anna Bligh tried it in Queensland in 2012...

[Deleted]

The election is tomorrow and it appears the NDP surge is now the NDP stagnation. Calculated Politics has the PCs on 71, compared to 48 for the NDP, 4 for the Grits and 1 for the Mike Schreiner in Guelph. Many of the seats appear to be close. Personally, I think PCs 1.5% - 2.5% ahead of the NDP. I would expect Windsor-Tecumseh to be the safest NDP seat, Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke to be the safest seat for the Tories, and Toronto-St Paul's for the Liberals.

[Sibboleth]

I mean they appear to be up at least 10pts on last time in what is still a three party province so...

[Deleted]

Jun 6, 2018 16:23:20 GMT Sibboleth said:

I mean they appear to be up at least 10pts on last time in what is still a three party province so...

I was referring to the change in their vote over the course of this campaign. There was speculation that the NDP surge would never terminate however the trend is not x=y

[pragmaticidealist]

It's almost unusual for there to *not* be radical changes in party support during the course of a Canadian election campaign.

[Khunanup]

Jun 6, 2018 18:10:40 GMT pragmaticidealist said:

It's almost unusual for there to *not* be radical changes in party support during the course of a Canadian election campaign.

It really isn't, it's just that there's been an unprecedented amount of it in the last few years. There are still plenty of deathly dull, predictable elections in Canada where one party doesn't completely shoot themselves in the foot during the campaign.

[Sibboleth]

This has been a particularly wild ride, but then Ontario especially does this every now and again. The Liberals were poised for big wins at the start of both the 1990 and 1995 campaigns.

[pragmaticidealist]

Jun 6, 2018 18:20:29 GMT Khunanup said:

Jun 6, 2018 18:10:40 GMT pragmaticidealist said:

It's almost unusual for there to *not* be radical changes in party support during the course of a Canadian election campaign.

It really isn't, it's just that there's been an unprecedented amount of it in the last few years. There are still plenty of deathly dull, predictable elections in Canada where one party doesn't completely shoot themselves in the foot during the campaign.

The 1993 federal election is perhaps the most striking example - the Progressive Conservatives were neck-and-neck with the Liberals for first place at the beginning of the campaign.

There's also been some epic polling disasters in recent years. Alberta 2012 and British Columbia 2013 come to mind. 

[Georg Ebner]

Having watched D.Ford on YouTube-videos i cannot imagine, that many (except most students and few elderly relying totally on the media) are scare-mongered of such an unexciting person (compared to his brother). Some wealthy with wide wallets might he embarrassed, though.
My guess:

40% = 70 Con.
35% = 50 NDP
17% = 04 Lib.